Waking the Creature
by Jennistar1
Summary: Spoilers for Blind Banker! Sometimes Sherlock needs a 'close-your-eyes' moment too...


**Sometimes Sherlock needs a hands-on-face-close-your-eyes moment too…My first Sherlock fic (uh, but not my first Sherlock Holmes fic), please review!**

It is a bad day. He has them sometimes, when there is too much interference, when the world is a little too close, when there is too much in his head and though he will try and he will _try_, he cannot for the life of him simply _think._ It drives him mad when he has no case. It drives him doubly mad when he does have a case, just like now, a good one, a _great_ one, a crime with an actually halfway _intelligent _perpetrator, and yet he cannot piece it together, cannot see it spread out, a huge map in his head, the streets processes, the buildings conclusions.

And there is noise, which doesn't help - Lestrade has decided that another 'drugs bust' (i.e. a search-for-evidence-which-Sherlock-might-have found-and-forgotten-to-give back-what-with-all-the-running-around-that-preceded-its-finding-and-everything), there are people everywhere, turning over _his _stuff, and Anderson is exclaiming about the cabbage in the violin case _breathing_, and Donovan is asking aloud _again _if they can just make a crime up and convict him of it, and Mrs Hudson is sighing and tutting at the people stripping the wallpaper, and John is asking if he is okay because he's pacing and pacing and finally it is too much, there is too much in his head and he shouts something, he doesn't know what, perhaps _for Christ's sake_, and his hand has struck something, what is it - oh, the doorframe…and then it is very quiet.

Sherlock stares over his shoulder. Everyone has frozen. People tend to do that when higher functioning sociopaths get angry. Anderson is holding the cabbage, which - my god _yes, _it _is _breathing - and Donovan is glaring, and Lestrade has his mouth half open, and John is watching him very carefully.

"Sherlock?" he says slowly. "You okay?"

Sherlock moves, if only to grip at his hair, and apparently this is some sort of signal for everyone to relax, because they all start moving again, and the noise, though quieter, begins once more.

"Can't think," he hears himself say. He pulls at his hair, as if the pain will help him, as if extending his hair will help him catch the thoughts floating around in the ether, drifting apart from his head where they belong. "There's so much - I don't know, I can't - I can't - I keep, thinking, it's so - fucking Jesus fucking _Christ -_ "

And then John steps forward, suddenly, and Sherlock is opening his mouth to ask what he is doing, and then he places two steady hands on either side of his face and says firmly, "Close your eyes."

Sherlock gapes at him. John says, a little more hesitantly, "Like in the train yard. You know, with the graffiti, and you - does it work? I mean with you? Because I don't - "

Sherlock, without answering him, closes his eyes.

It is darker. That's nice. But there's still noise, damn _noise_ -

"Shut _up_," he orders, loudly even to his ears. There is silence. He almost gives into the smug urge to open his eyes and catch their reactions, but John's hands press a little more firmly to his cheeks and he curbs it.

He realises he is still breathing fast, and his heart is drumming insistently in his head like rain on a metal roof, and no _wonder_ he couldn't think, with it so loud, so _repetitive_…He stops his breathing, then starts again, deep and slow. Inhale, exhale, Sherlock, yes, that's it, not difficult is it -

There is nothingness inside his head. It happens so rarely that he wishes he could stay in it, just for a while, just float around in this blissful blank blackness and forget…well, _everything_. But there is a case to solve and if nothing else will propel him into action, this will.

He must have made some sort of sound, because John says, "Sherlock?"

"Facts," he says without moving. "Information. Facts. Give me them."

There is a slight hesitation, then John says, uncertainly, "Dead girl?"

Sherlock nods; John's hands slide against his face at the action and he needs to take another breath to calm his suddenly accelerating heartbeat back down. "More," he says.

"O…kay. Two deaths. Female lawyer and a young girl, her daughter."

He can feel it, uncurling in the back of his head, the call of his genius. It is a creature, hot and hungry, all teeth and claws, but he welcomes it like a drowning man would welcome oxygen. Oxygen in his head, making life interesting again, smothering the _boredom._ This creature of his genius may have claws, but he'd rather feel pain than nothing at all.

He catches his breath. "Keep going," he whispers. "Come on, come on."

"Mother stabbed in the chest, the young girl shot in the head." He can see them, yes, he can see their crumpled bodies, he remembers walking around them, come _on _brain _more information._ "All found in the same apartment block. Uh. Neighbour saw a man enter there earlier who she identified as the lawyer's lover and then she says she saw him leave hurriedly a while afterwards, in some sort of state she said. Um. Lestrade said it was obvious he did it, but you said Lestrade was being…erm. You disagreed." _Did he? _Yes he did. Why did he do that? John's hands are soft on his face…"There were footprints in blood on the floor around the bodies, a man's size eight I think you said…When they brought the lover into Scotland Yard, they found the knife on him but the gun was still in the flat, no fingerprints Anderson said…Uh."

He's there. Something strange. The creature in his head whispers _why two weapons? Why stab and shoot? _It whispers _why keep the knife but leave the gun? No no no…something is not right. _He enjoys that feeling, that sentence. _Something is not right._ It wakes him up, it brings him back into himself, it shakes the world into its right place again…

All right. He is there. He's walking around the bodies, he is _there_, everything, in the flat, he is -

Oh.

_Oh._

_She never did like her mother's lover. He beat them both. Sherlock saw the bruises, too old to be during or after death, he's not stupid._

_But to this extent - _

_But _yes. Yes yes yes. _He sees it now. The stabbing and the shooting. Good god. Yes._

_She kills the mother first. The lover walks in and sees. She slips the knife into his pocket as he does so. Then, when he turns around, she screams, she cries, she says she didn't know, she just came home and she was there, oh god oh god she was there, why why why. No, she says. She does not want to go with him to the police. She wants to stay with mum. Mum mum mum she cries._

_He runs out. No signal on his phone, ah yes, of course. She takes a shoe of his, left at home, covers it in her dead mother's blood and carefully makes imprints on the floor. Then she throws the shoe out of the window, fixes the silencer to the gun, his gun, which is ironic, and shoots herself._

Sherlock's head is hurting, but it is also blazing, blazing with life, he is himself again, and my _god_ he can see it all now, so perfectly and…and he has forgotten to breathe. Again.

"Sherlock?" John is saying. "Uh. Sherlock?"

He takes in a great _whoop _of breath and flashes open his eyes, and for a moment John can see directly into Sherlock's overly wide gaze, his pupils large and overwhelming, swallowing up their grey irises like two black holes suffocating stars. For a moment he wonders if he can see a flash of that…that _thing_ in Sherlock's head which makes him such a genius, that darkness, that energy. And then it is gone, and Sherlock is back, breathing hard, head clasped in John's hands, which weren't shaking until now.

"_Oh_," Sherlock says, and my god, it is the deepest and most sensual gasp John has ever heard. And then, "_Perfect._"

"You've solved it?" John asks. Lestrade is making impatient noises behind his back.

Sherlock slides his own hands up to grip at John's, which are still on his cheeks, and then he squeezes John's fingers and beams at him, a genuine smile, a smile that he does not often see, a smile beyond all other smiles.

"You, John Watson," he says, "Are a goddamn _genius._"

John knows that this is not true, that he is not the allotted genius in the house, that he will never measure up to Sherlock's standards, not if he tried for the rest of his life, and that it is wrong to be called a genius for something which was Sherlock's idea in the first place, but being complimented by Sherlock, and genuinely, is so rare that he feels his heart warm. Sherlock's smile is and always has been infectious, and he finds himself smiling in return. After all, why not?

Sherlock is back.


End file.
